JUBA, Sudan, (Reuters) July 8 - Landmine experts said on Friday they had found and cleared nearly 1,800 bullets, grenades and other old explosives near the site of South Sudan's independence ceremony - an event that will be attended by world leaders.
Dignitaries at the event in the southern capital Juba on Saturday will include U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and around 30 heads of state.
South Sudan is due to become an independent nation at midnight (2100 GMT) on Friday, a separation that is the climax of a process made possible by the 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war with the north.
British mine clearance group MAG said it cleared the first unexploded objects late last week after the southern government called it in to check the site opposite the memorial to the territory's civil war hero John Garang.
"There were mortars, grenades, rockets, an assortment," MAG South Sudan Programme Office Michelle Healy told Reuters.
"You never really can tell whether they would have exploded. Some items, they don't have any explosives in them any more. Other items might have fuses and no explosives. It is very hard to say what could go off and when ... They have been there for 10, 15 years, maybe even more."
By midday on Tuesday they had found nearly 1,800 items that were taken away and destroyed, she said.
Healy said the group had cleared all the areas that would be used in the celebrations, including the site and Garang's mausoleum itself. "The site was quality assessed by the U.N.'s Mine Action Office," she added.
Many of the objects were found under the surface of the ground, on the location of old ammunition stores and barracks from the time of Sudan's north-south civil war, MAG said.
"At some point the stores exploded scattering thousands of rockets, mortars, artillery shells, grenades and other munitions across the area," said MAG Technical Operations Manager Ivica Stilin.
South Sudan and other battlefield areas in the north were littered with landmines and other explosives during decades of civil war. (Writing by Andrew Heavens, editing by Tim Pearce)
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